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Another Meaningless Unscientific Poll

The media is falling over itself spouting another poll that shows Trump in the lead nationally over other Republican contenders. Even on Morning Joe this morning, it lead the news cycle in the first segment. The poll may be viewed here.

The problem with this poll is in the methodology:

The NBC News Online Survey was conducted online by SurveyMonkey August 7-8, 2015 among a national sample of 3,551 adults aged 18 and over. Respondents for this non-probability survey were selected from the nearly three million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day.

So, the fact of the matter is, this poll was not random, which means that it cannot be generalized to the class of voters is purports to measure. In other words, it is a meaningless poll that measures people who select themselves to take the poll and thus it cannot be used as a measurement of what the voters think.

So this poll does not measure Republican voters, and it cannot be passed off as a representative poll that measures Republican opinion.

Trump may be the front runner, but this poll does not demonstrate that fact, if true.